<html><head></head><body><h1>Pierre-Auguste_Renoir</h1>
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<br />Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841 December 3, 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that &quot;Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau&quot;. Read, Herbert: The Meaning of Art, page 127. Faber, 1931.
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<br /><h1>Biography</h1>
<br /><h2>Youth</h2>
<br />Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. Renoir, Jean: Renoir, My Father, pages 57–67. Collins, 1962.  He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. Vollard, Ambroise: Renoir, An Intimate Record, pages 24–29. Knopf, 1925.  During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
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<br />The Theater Box, 1874 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London
<br />In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. Vollard, page 30.  At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, Wadley, Nicholas: Renoir, A Retrospective, page 15. Park Lane, 1989.  recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.
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<br />During the Paris Commune in 1871, while he painted on the banks of the Seine River, some members of a commune group thought he was a spy, and were about to throw him into the river when a commune leader, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion. Renoir, Jean, pages 118–21. Different and less life-threatening versions are offered by Paul Valéry and Vollard. In all accounts, however, their re-acquaintance led to great celebration.
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<br />In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Coeur and his family ended, Wadley, page 15.  and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association, but a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest.
<br />This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.
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<br /><h2>Maturity</h2>
<br />Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.
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<br />The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris
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<br />In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, Poulet, A. L., &amp; Murphy, A. R. (1979). Corot to Braque: French Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, page 117. Boston: The Museum. ISBN 0-87846-134-5.  then to Madrid, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that he traveled to Italy to see Titian&apos;s masterpieces in Florence and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On January 15, 1882 Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner&apos;s portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria after contracting pneumonia, which would cause permanent damage to his respiratory system. Wadley, page 25.
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<br />In 1883, he spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin&apos;s, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape which includes beaches, cliffs, bays, forests, and mountains. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.
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<br />While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed as a model Suzanne Valadon, who posed for him (The Bathers, 1885–87; Dance at Bougival, 1883) Wadley, pages 371, 374.  and many of his fellow painters while studying their techniques; eventually she became one of the leading painters of the day.
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<br />In 1887, a year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen&apos;s associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the &quot;French Impressionist Paintings&quot; catalog as a token of his loyalty.
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<br />In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist&apos;s friends, had already served as a model for Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881), and with whom he already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.  After his marriage Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline&apos;s cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.
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<br />Girls at the Piano, 1892, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris.
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<br /><h2>Later years</h2>
<br />Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of &quot;Les Collettes,&quot; a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Wadley, page 28.  Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers, André, Albert: Renoir. Crés, 1928.  but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand.  Boonen, A.; van de Rest, J.; Dequeker, J.; van der Linden, S.: &quot;How Renoir Coped with Rheumatoid Arthritis&quot;. British Medical Journal, 1997:315:1704 1708.  The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.
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<br />During this period he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works with his limited joint mobility.
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<br />In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d&apos;Azur, on December 3.
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<br /><h1>Artworks</h1>
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<br />Renoir&apos;s paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.
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<br />His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas&apos; sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher. Rey, Robert: La Renaissance du Sentiment Classique, Les Beaux Arts, 1931.
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<br />A fine example of Renoir&apos;s early work, and evidence of the influence of Courbet&apos;s realism, is Diana, 1867. Ostensibly a mythological subject, the painting is a naturalistic studio work, the figure carefully observed, solidly modeled, and superimposed upon a contrived landscape. If the work is still a &apos;student&apos; piece, already Renoir&apos;s heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, then the artist&apos;s mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings.  &quot;From the Tour: Mary Cassatt&quot;, August Renoir. Accessed March 07, 2007.
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<br />In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).  Image:Renoir11.jpg — Wikimedia Commons  at commons.wikimedia.org   Image:Claude Monet La GrenouillÃ©re.jpg — Wikimedia Commons  at commons.wikimedia.org
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<br />One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir&apos;s 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived.On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago
<br />The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid 1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884–87. It was a trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. Clark, Kenneth: The Nude, pages 154–61. Penguin, 1960.  This is sometimes called his &quot;Ingres period&quot;, as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures. Asked late in life if he felt an affinity to Ingres, he responded: &quot;I should very much like to&quot;. Rey, quoted in Wadley, page 336.
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<br />After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1918–19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir&apos;s late, abundantly fleshed nudes. &quot; For me, Renoir becomes a really great artist in the late nudes, above all in Les Grandes Baigneuses&quot;. David Sylvester, quoted by Wadley, page 378.
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<br />A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir&apos;s style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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<br /><h1>Posthumous prints</h1>
<br />In 1919, Ambroise Vollard, a renowned art dealer, published a book on the life and work of Renoir, La Vie et Oeuvre de Pierre Auguste Renoir, in an edition of 1000 copies. In 1986, Vollard&apos;s heirs started reprinting the copper plates, generally etchings with hand applied watercolor. These prints are signed by Renoir in the plate and are embossed “Vollard” in the lower margin. They are unnumbered, undated and not signed in pencil.
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<br /><h1>Posthumous sales</h1>
<br />Two of Renoir&apos;s paintings have sold for more than US$70 million.   Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78.1 million in 1990.
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<br /><h1>See also</h1>
<br />*History of painting
<br />*Western painting
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<br /><h1>Gallery</h1>
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<br />Image:Renoir11.jpg|La Grenouillère, 1868, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 110.jpg|Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1868 
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 083.jpg|Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 112.jpg|Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris, France
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 094.jpg|Mme. Charpentier and her children, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - By the Water.jpg|By the Water, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
<br />Image:Dejeuner-canotiers.jpg|Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881, The Phillips Collection Washington, DC
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 107.jpg|Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel, 1882
<br />File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 019.jpg|Dance in the City, 1882–1883, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris, France
<br />Image:Auguste Renoir - La danse à la campagne.jpg|Dance in the Country (Aline Charigot and Paul Lhote), 1883, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris
<br />File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Study for &apos;Dance in the Country&apos;, pencil, 1883.jpg|Pencil study for Dance in the Country 1883, Honolulu Academy of Arts
<br />File:Renoir16.jpg|Children at the Beach at Guernsey, 1883, Barnes Foundation Merion, Pennsylvania
<br />File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - In the Garden.jpg|In the Garden, 1885, Hermitage St. Petersburg
<br />Image:Girl with a hoop.jpg|Girl With a Hoop, 1885
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon).jpg|Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon), 1885
<br />Image:Pierre Auguste Renoir - Portrait Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie.jpg|Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894
<br />Image:Pierre Auguste Renoir La famille d artiste.jpg|The Artist&apos;s Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 106.jpg|Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 113.jpg|Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910
<br />Image:Renoir Self-Portrait 1910.jpg|Self-portrait, 1910
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<br /><h1>Renoir and the nude</h1>
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<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 020.jpg|Diana the Huntress, 1867, The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 002.jpg|Nude In The Sun, 1875, Musée d&apos;Orsay, Paris, France
<br />Image:Renoir15.jpg|Seating Girl, 1883
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 021.jpg|The Large Bathers, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pa.
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 085.jpg|After The Bath, 1888
<br />Image:Renoir26.jpg|Three Bathers, 1895, Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Femme nue couchée (Gabrielle).jpg|Woman on a Couch (Gabrielle), 1906–1907
<br />Image:Renoir18.jpg|After The Bath, 1910, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 030.jpg|Woman At The Well, 1910
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Baigneuse assise s&apos;essuyant une jambe.jpg|Seated Bather Drying Her Leg, 1914, Musee de l&apos;Orangerie, Paris, France
<br />Image:Pierre-Auguste Renoir 009.jpg|Women Bathers, 1916, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
<br />Image:Pierre Auguste Renoir Les baigneuses.jpg|Bathers, 1918, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania
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<br /><h1>Selected works</h1>
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<br />*Mademoiselle Romaine Lacaux (1864)
<br />*La Promenade (1870)
<br />*Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873)
<br />*La Loge (1874) 
<br />*Woman with Fan (1875) 
<br />*The Swing (1876)
<br />*Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers&apos; Lunch) (1875)
<br />*Girl with a Watering Can (1876)
<br />*Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876)
<br />*Nude in the Sunlight (1876)
<br />*Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878)
<br />*Jeanne Samary (1879) 
<br />*Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg) (1879)
<br />*Two Women with Umbrellas (1879) 
<br />*On the Terrace (1881)
<br />*Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)
<br />*The Piazza San Marco, Venice (1881)
<br />*Blonde Bather (1881)
<br />*Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d&apos;Anvers (Pink and Blue) (1881)
<br />*By the Seashore (1883)
<br />*Umbrellas (1883)
<br />*Dance at Bougival (1883)
<br />*Fog at Guernsey (1883)
<br />*Children on the Sea Shore in Guernsey (1883)
<br />*The Bay of Moulin Huet Seen Through the Trees (1883)
<br />*Girl with a Hoop (1885)
<br />*Bathers (1887)
<br />*The Bather (After the Bath) (1888)
<br />*Young Girl with Daisies (1889)
<br />*In the Meadow (1890)
<br />*The Apple Sellers (1890)
<br />*Two Girls at the Piano (1892)
<br />*Vase of Chrysanthemums (1895)
<br />*Coco (1905)
<br />*Standing Bather (1906)
<br />*Nude (1910)
<br />*The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes (1908–1914)
<br />*The Concert (1918)
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<br /><h1>Bibliography</h1>
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<br /><h1>References</h1>
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<br /><h1>Related links</h1>
<br />*Gabrielle Renard — Renoir family&apos;s nanny
<br />*Jean Renoir — This legendary director was the second son of Renoir
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<br /><h1>External links</h1>
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<br />* Renoir at biography.com
<br />* How Renoir Coped with Rheumatoid Arthritis article in British Medical Journal by Boonen A. et al.
<br />* The Story Behind the Masterpiece... The Luncheon of the Boating Party
<br />* Suburban Pastoral, The Guardian, 24 Feb 2007
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<br />*  Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings, media &amp; interactive timeline
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